Control of Colloid Stability through Zeta Potential, Volume I (1968)

By Thomas Riddick - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary

Thomas Riddick photographed a single drop of Red Cross ACD whole blood — the standard product administered in hospital transfusions across the United States — five days after collection. The photomicrographs showed agglomerated masses ranging from 150 microns to 1,600 microns in length. Extrapolated to a full pint, the count of large agglomerates approximated 34,000, with smaller agglomerates and filaments exceeding 100,000. Human capillaries are eight microns wide. The filters recommended by the American Association of Blood Banks have openings of 86 to 249 microns. Every agglomerate that passed the filter had to be dissolved by the recipient’s plasma or produce an embolism. Control of Colloid Stability through Zeta Potential, Volume I (1968), documents this and much else besides — including the physicochemical mechanism by which the American food supply, the American kitchen, and the American water treatment system had by the mid-1960s driven the blood colloids of ordinary Americans toward the electrical zero point at which the microcirculation begins to silt up. Riddick offered in 1965 to fund at his own expense a definitive experiment on drawing non-coagulating blood by proper application of the underlying principle. The NIH did not reply.

Riddick was a consulting engineer and chemist, not a physician. He had spent three decades applying the physical chemistry of colloid stability to industrial water treatment and had designed the electrophoresis instrumentation — the Zeta-Meter — that made routine measurement of surface charge possible. Municipal water plants at Waterford, Gouverneur, and Belgrave operated on the principles he laid out. His father was a country doctor, the nineteenth physician on his paternal side, who died at 53 in 1907; his grandfather had practiced in the era before Pasteur. Riddick himself served as boyhood surgical assistant to Dr. Thomas Carter from ages 12 to 16. He turned his instruments on his own blood at age 60, after twelve years of angina, paroxysmal tachycardia, and premature ventricular contractions occurring every four to six beats. He self-published Volume I through his own firm because commercial and institutional channels declined the manuscript. Volume II, promised repeatedly in the text, appears never to have been produced.

In 1968, American cardiology was organized around the polarization-depolarization theory of the electrocardiogram (Einthoven, 1903), the coagulation “factors” cascade, the germ-theory framing of blood microbial activity, and the presumption that trivalent aluminum in cookware and food additives posed no health hazard. The Kettering Laboratory report of 1957, financed by the Aluminum Association, had given aluminum a clean bill of health for oral consumption while noting on its own pages that aluminum hydroxide dissolves readily in stomach acid and that intravenous aluminum precipitates in the bloodstream at concentrations above one percent. Harvey Wiley, the first head of the FDA, had documented in his 1929 book History of a Crime Against the Food Law his twenty-nine-year effort to keep alum out of American food before resigning in disgust in 1912. Melvin Knisely had by 1968 spent over twenty years documenting intravascular coagulation in the bulbar conjunctiva of ordinary Americans using a horizontally-aimed stereoscopic microscope, finding significant sludge in 40 to 50 percent of apparently healthy people between the ages of 25 and 65. Autopsies of Korean War soldiers, average age 22, had shown 75 percent with early arteriosclerosis. In 1962, cardiovascular disease killed 957,000 Americans — a figure exceeding U.S. casualties in both world wars plus the combined deaths from the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Riddick is a convergent witness from a discipline outside the terrain lineage. Trained in industrial physical chemistry, dedicating the book to Helmholtz, Krogh, Planck, and Claude Bernard, he arrives at terrain-compatible conclusions through Bernard’s milieu intérieur rather than through Béchamp or Shelton. The full summary unpacks his spectrographic comparison of fresh versus canned vegetables showing a 2.54-fold average increase in mineral load — a factor that matches, almost exactly, the concentration overload at which the American kidney now routinely operates. It documents the analysis of Riddick’s own urine during and after an attack of paroxysmal tachycardia, showing his kidneys discarding aluminum at 13:1 and sodium at 3:1 while retaining magnesium at 1:37 and potassium at 1:4. It presents his oscilloscope traces of nearly indistinguishable QRS complexes produced by tapping a dill pickle, a chicken heart, and an apple with a small mallet — evidence that the electrocardiogram may register blood movement rather than membrane depolarization. The Kettering paper is on the record. The photomicrographs of transfusion blood are on the record. The offer to the NIH is on the record. The reply never came.

The rest of this summary — the analogy, one-minute elevator explanation, 12-point summary, Q&As, and Golden Nugget — is for paid subscribers.

Your subscription also unlocks every other book summary in the library, the Deep Dive Audio Library, my original books (new ones added monthly), and three series for the moments when a real decision is in front of you: Questions for Your Doctor, Before You Consent, and Package Inserts.